Property
Property is a system of rights that gives people legal control of valuable things, and also refers to the valuable things themselves. Depending on the nature of the property, an owner of property may have the right to consume, alter, share, rent, sell, exchange, transfer, give away, or destroy it, or to exclude others from doing these things, as well as to perhaps abandon it; whereas regardless of the nature of the property, the owner thereof has the right to properly use it under the granted property rights.
In economics and political economy, there are three broad forms of property: private property, public property, and collective property. Property may be jointly owned by more than one party equally or unequally, or according to simple or complex agreements; to distinguish ownership and easement from rent, there is an expectation that each party's will with regard to the property be clearly defined and unconditional.. The parties may expect their wills to be unanimous, or alternatively each may expect their own will to be sufficient when no opportunity for dispute exists.
In American law, the first Restatement defines property as anything, tangible or intangible, whereby a legal relationship between persons and the State enforces a possessory interest or legal title in that thing. This mediating relationship between individual, property, and State is called a property regime.
In sociology and anthropology, property is often defined as a relationship between two or more individuals and an object, in which at least one of these individuals holds a bundle of rights over the object. The distinction between collective and private property is regarded as confusion, since different individuals often hold differing rights over a single object.
Types of property include real property, personal property, private property, public property and intellectual property—including exclusive rights over artistic creations and inventions. However, the latter is not always widely recognized or enforced. An article of property may have physical and incorporeal parts. A title, or a right of ownership, establishes the relation between the property and other persons, assuring the owner the right to dispose of the property as the owner sees fit. The unqualified term "property" is often used to refer specifically to real property.
Overview
Property is often defined by the code of the local sovereignty and protected wholly or – more usually, partially – by such entity, the owner being responsible for any remainder of protection. The standards of the proof concerning proofs of ownerships are also addressed by the code of the local sovereignty, and such entity plays a role accordingly, typically somewhat managerial. Some philosophers assert that property rights arise from social convention, while others find justifications for them in morality or in natural law.Various scholarly disciplines may treat the concept more systematically, but definitions vary, most particularly when involving contracts. Positive law defines such rights, and the judiciary can adjudicate and enforce property rights.
According to Adam Smith, the expectation of profit from "improving one's stock of capital" rests on private-property rights. Capitalism has as a central assumption that property rights encourage their holders to develop the property, generate wealth, and efficiently allocate resources based on the operation of markets. From this has evolved the modern conception of property as a right enforced by positive law, in the expectation that this will produce more wealth and better standards of living. However, Smith also expressed a very critical view of the effects of property laws on inequality:
In his 1881 text "The Common Law", Oliver Wendell Holmes describes property as having two fundamental aspects. The first, possession, can be defined as control over a resource based on the practical inability to contradict the ends of the possessor. The second title is the expectation that others will recognize rights to control resources, even when not in possession. He elaborates on the differences between these two concepts and proposes a history of how they came to be attached to persons, as opposed to families or entities such as the church.
- Classical liberalism subscribes to the labor theory of property. Its proponents hold that individuals each own their own life; it follows that one must acknowledge the products of that life and that those products can be traded in free exchange with others.
- Conservatism subscribes to the concept that freedom and property are closely linked - building on traditions of thought that property guarantees freedom or causes freedom. The more widespread the possession of the private property, conservatism propounds, the more stable and productive a state or nation is. Conservatives maintain that the economic leveling of property, especially of the forced kind, is not economic progress.
- Socialism's fundamental principles center on a critique of this concept, stating that the cost of defending property exceeds the returns from private property ownership and that, even when property rights encourage their holders to develop their property or generate wealth, they do so only for their benefit, which may not coincide with advantage to other people or society at large.
- Libertarian Socialism generally accepts property rights with a short abandonment period. In other words, a person must make continuous use of the item or else lose ownership rights. This is usually referred to as "possession property" or "usufruct." Thus, in this usufruct system, absentee ownership is illegitimate, and workers own the machines or other equipment they work with.
- Communism argues that only common ownership of the means of production will assure the minimization of unequal or unjust outcomes and the maximization of benefits and that; therefore humans should abolish private ownership of capital.
Types of property
Most legal systems distinguish between different types of property, especially between land and all other forms of property—goods and chattels, movable property or personal property, including the value of legal tender if not the legal tender itself, as the manufacturer rather than the possessor might be the owner. They often distinguish tangible and intangible property. One categorization scheme specifies three species of property: land, improvements, and personal property.In common law, real property is the combination of interests in land and improvements thereto, and personal property is interest in movable property. Real property rights are rights relating to the land. These rights include ownership and usage. Owners can grant rights to persons and entities in the form of leases, licenses, and easements.
Throughout the last centuries of the second millennium, with the development of more complex theories of property, the concept of personal property had become divided into tangible property and intangible property.
Treatment of intangible property is such that an article of property is, by law or otherwise by traditional conceptualization, subject to expiration even when inheritable, which is a key distinction from tangible property. Upon expiration, the property, if of the intellectual category, becomes a part of public domain, to be used by but not owned by anybody, and possibly used by more than one party simultaneously due to the inapplicability of scarcity to intellectual property. Whereas things such as communications channels and pairs of electromagnetic spectrum bands and signal transmission power can only be used by a single party at a time, or a single party in a divisible context, if owned or used. Thus far or usually, those are not considered property, or at least not private property, even though the party bearing right of exclusive use may transfer that right to another.
In many societies the human body is considered property of some kind or other. The question of the ownership and rights to one's body arise in general in the discussion of human rights, including the specific issues of slavery, conscription, rights of children under the age of majority, marriage, abortion, prostitution, drugs, euthanasia and organ donation.
Related concepts
Of the following, only sale and at-will sharing involve no encumbrance.Violation
| General meaning or description, the activities occurring in a way not beholden to the wishes of the owner | Committer | |
| Trespassing | Use of physical and usually but not necessarily only immovable property or occupation of it. | Trespasser |
| Vandalism | Alteration, damage, or destruction of physical property or to the appearance of it. | Vandal |
| Infringement | Alteration or duplication of an instance of intellectual property, and publication of the respectively alternate or duplicate; the sample being the information in a medium or a device for which a design plan predates and is the basis of fabrication. | Infringer |
| Violation | Alteration or duplication of an instance of intellectual property, and publication of the respectively alternate or duplicate; the sample being the information in a medium or a device for which a design plan predates and is the basis of fabrication. | Violator |
| Theft | Taking of property in a way that excludes the owner from it, or functional alteration of the property ownership. | Thief |
| Piracy | The cognisant or incognisant reproduction and distribution of intellectual property and the possession of intellectual property that saw publication of its duplicates in the previous process. | Pirate |
| Piracy | Infringement with the effect of lost profits for the owner or infringement involving profit or personal gain. | Pirate |
| Plagiarism | Publication of a work, whether it is intellectual property or not, whether it is in public domain or not, without credit being afforded to the creator, as though the work is original in publication. | Plagiarist |